HP has unveiled a trio of new webOS devices, including a pint-sized smartphone known as the Veer, a beefier business phone dubbed the Pre3, and, yes, the first Palm tablet: the HP TouchPad.
The devices are designed to work in concert, and to dovetail with myriad "cloud-based" services, consolidating your calendar appointments …

How long before they change the advertising? "Touchstone - Place TouchPad on Touchstone and it charges automatically. There’s nothing to plug in." really? So I don't have to plug the dock into a wall socket or USB port?

@ Don S

Agreed. Anyone who wants a tablet either has an iPad or is waiting for the competition to catch up... ANY decent competition. If this tab had been scheduled for a March release it might just have been a winner... "sometime this summer" just doesn't cut it when there'll be 10+ top notch tablets on the shelves by then.

HP's turn

Palm is dead. There wasn't a mention of Palm anywhere. WebOS is HP's assault on the sector and frankly it looks bloody brilliant. Before I became an Android fanboi, WebOS tempted me, but for the hardware being a bit crap. However, HP can more than make up for that. Are they going to go along the Apple route? probably and in doing this they have one hell of a hill to climb (read apps). If they successfully manage to put WebOS on the desktop too however, then the benefits to enterprise will give them a boost no one else can come close to claiming.

a pint-sized smartphone

Apps, Apps, Apps ... Where are they?

So wheres the software integration/migration paths? The apps store model? The interface which makes publishing apps to this platform _straightforward_? Looking at the enormous iPad/Android legacy - how easy is it to take an app developed for one of those platforms and move it to this one?

Well guess what? Everyone in the IT device racket wants lock-in/love-in to their device of the moment ... Why would anyone bother writing particular and specific apps just for this platform, as funky as this seems? Its just another tablet/smartphone combo, after all. Seems a bit of a gamble.

How about this?

Why the concern about "apps"?

If apps are important, then why don't people make that argument in favour of Windows too, which surely has more than any other platform? Why even consider a tablet, when a netbook running a full desktop OS like Windows or Linux will give you vast amounts of software?

The argument I instead hear is "most people just want to browse the Internet or email, so this other OS on a tablet is fine for that". I presume that WebOS has a browser, so what's the problem here?

Most IOS apps seems to just be wrappers for websites anyway, or basic things like fart/purity ring apps. We're not talking Photoshop and Office here.

"Apple will have had an 18 month start by the time this gets to market "

I don't think that's a problem - I suspect the market will continue to grow significantly. Apple were hardly the first ones out with a tablet, after all. They're just taking advantage of a market that's much bigger than a few years ago when you had Nokia and Archos tablets. And it will grow bigger still.

Is WebOS still WebOS without gestures?

The TouchPad has no gesture area. Any of you who have experienced WebOS would know that this is one of the defining aspects of the UI and makes the device a real pleasure to use in comparison with competing mobile OSs.

HP have decided to remove the gesture area from the TouchPad - this is a terrible mistake. Okay, it may have taken a bit of thought to get it to operate intuitively on a larger device that is designed to rotate etc. but I simply cannot even envisage using WebOS without being able to swipe between apps, swipe forwards and backwards in the browser, meta-tap for menu links and copy/paste etc.

The worst of this is that the gesture area was the probably the component of the OS most suitable for further development: multi-touch gestures, shortcuts, all sorts of things spring to mind.